Maternal Mortality Reduction Program

The Government of Canada has assumed its global responsibilities in leading the G-8 to a reflection of the needs of under-developed countries in ensuring the needs of its most vulnerable will be reckoned with. To aid development in those countries to further the health and longevity of children and their mothers. A concerted effort on the part of the advanced, wealthy countries of the world to put their aid dollars to good use by establishing facilities to offer potable water and sanitation, good nutrition and health care for women and their children.

Women offered the opportunity to educate themselves about family planning and conception, about the intelligent spacing of pregnancies and limiting of same through educational health clinics will be empowered to at least partially reserve for themselves the ability to choose when, whether and how to have children. Exposure to good family planning techniques, to decent hygiene, to healthy food choices for themselves and their children should translate to a healthier population.

That Canada has chosen officially to bypass funding abortion as one of many tools in the workbox of women's childbearing health is unfortunate. Of course, those countries that criticize Canada for that decision, like the United States, talk a good line but internally access to state-paid abortion procedures is politically resisted. Canada's firm decision on refusing to fund abortions abroad is not, however, helpful.

The total package of health-care opportunities offered to poor women in under-developed countries should include abortion. On the other hand, there will be other countries within the G-8 who will fund this option. Still, it's disappointing that the Conservative-led Canadian government, while seemingly complacent about not raising the divisive issue about abortion access within Canada, yet still chooses to resist offering to fund it abroad. Despite what the government asserts, this is not what most Canadians want.

But then, there's an interesting revelation, in connection with this needed assistance to help third-world women overcome maternal morbidity and mortality resulting from lack of proper obstetrics services, overall sanitary conditions, health-required nutrition, safe water and health care. And that is the unspoken-of agenda emanating from sources within the United Nations and NGOs toward population control.

It does make good sense to control the number of births per family to help ensure that mothers are not overburdened by children they cannot attend to adequately, nor afford to raise. That UN and NGO-affiliated programs are linking maternal health programs with safer childbearing, plus population control is interesting.

It can certainly be advantageous to the target community and also to the world at large, diminishing steadily rising population numbers while at the same time ensuring that those births that do occur, are well maintained and the resulting children given the opportunity to grow to maturity. But this exchange of help through availability of funding for maternal health programs, aligned with acceptance of contraception in societies unwilling to accept one for the other, is coercive.

Maternal- and child-health care programs should come without strings attached. If an additional feature of such programs is to convince the target society and the mothers within, that fewer children would make their lives easier, safer, healthier, then such an educational program should be launched, separate and apart from the health-provision aspect.

Fertility reduction and ensuring that maternal health is improved are both laudable goals. They are not mutually exclusive. But both require separate educational programs to succeed in each direction. One need not be tied to the other.